Saturday, July 20, 2013

It’s not one of the times when you ask
yourself: What was he thinking?

We know exactly what Aaron Sorkin was thinking when he put
together his train wreck of a show: “The Newsroom.”

Acclaimed screenwriter Sorkin let fame go to his head. He
knew he was a great writer, but he convinced himself that he was also a great
thinker. He believed that his opinions were so obviously true that he could
save the Republic by showing how the network news should be run.

He ended up showing us why he is not running the network
news.

Imagine his surprise when the first season of “The Newsroom”
was uniformly panned by television critics.

If Sorkin thought that having characters mouth politically
correct bromides would cause the commentariat to swoon, he was very wrong.

Nevertheless, the show was renewed. Insider buzz suggested
that Sorkin had learned his lesson and would be offering a new improved “Newroom”
this year.

After watching the first show of the second season I can report
that the buzz was wrong. The show continues to be propagandistic; the
characters are still unsympathetic; they all speak too quickly; the plot lines still express adolescent liberalism. A great screenwriter like
Sorkin should know that the approach makes for bad storytelling.

The lead character, Will McAvoy is a smug, self-righteous,
self-important asshole… excuse the expression. It is impossible to care about
McAvoy, or, for that matter, about any of the other characters. No audience is
going to care about characters that are merely vehicles for disseminating the
puerile political opinions of Aaron Sorkin.

When it comes to political opinion, this year Sorkin has
chosen to double down on stupid. His first episode revolves around McAvoy’s
statement that “the Tea Party is the American Taliban.” Admittedly, there are
precincts where the Tea Party is routinely excoriated, even singled out for
political persecution, but no one with a brain really believes that the Tea
Party is the American Taliban.

Writing in the Guardian,
not an organ of the Tea Party, Jeff Jarvis takes the full measure of Aaron
Sorkin’s failure:

You
could be forgiven for thinking that journalists hate
The Newsroom because we are
unbearable, self-centered nitpickers who think the show doesn't tell our story.

You'd
be right to theorize that we hate The Newsroom because:
• it is filled with sanctimonious showoff soliloquies by its creator, Aaron Sorkin
• It exploits headlines with hindsight instead of insight, though at least that
gives the audience the foresight to dread what's coming (says
The Onion: "Nation hoping 'The Newsroom' ends before Trayvon Martin
storyline")
• It portrays women as ego-deprived, simpering, clumsy, man-dependent fools who
are afraid to display their own intelligence and don't know how email works
• It portrays men as ego-sated, sexist, horny, loser oafs
• It – or rather, Sorkin – hates the Internet, the domain of "the pajama
people"
• It forces its actors to talk faster than a New Yorker on a case of Red Bull
and, worse, has them finish each others' sentences, which would make a real New
Yorker just slap them.

In other words, the show fails because it’s all about Aaron
Sorkin.

But Jarvis offers a cogent explanation for why journalists
hate “The Newsroom.” They hate it because it makes them look like smug,
self-righteous, self-important assholes.

Ultimately, Jarvis is disappointed by a missed opportunity:

On
The Newsroom Sorkin's characters act mournful and mopey that they can't fix
their sex lives or the world when what they should be fixing is their industry.
And in truth, all they really do is read the news off TelePrompTers and get
paid way too much to do so. They don't earn their ennui.

Sorkin
could reinvent TV news. He could present us with a vision of what it could be.
TV news could be good at explaining complex issues and narratives. It could be
good at visualizing complex data. It could be good at telling us what we should
know rather than what we already know. It could be good at giving us the point
of view of witnesses -- real witnesses who now carry their own camera trucks in
their pockets. It could be good at convening us to action.

But TV
news isn't any of that that and neither is Sorkin's moody rendition of it in
the show within his show. He merely takes TV news as it is and adds a layer of
adolescent emotion and obnoxious rhetoric to it. That's why I hate The
Newsroom.

While I mostly agree with Jarvis, I would add one slight
qualification. There is no way on earth that Aaron Sorkin was going to reinvent
televisions news. If he thought that he could, he should be treated for hubris.
If he chosen a less ambitious project, one that involved telling an interesting story with characters we care about he
might have succeeded. For having aimed too high, he failed.

4 comments:

"There is no way on earth that Aaron Sorkin was going to reinvent televisions news. If he thought that he could, he should be treated for hubris."

I'm certain that somebody out there could start a project to see whether they could make an adequate form of television news that is more useful than our current version.

However, the problem with Aaron Sorkin trying to do something like that is the fact that he's Aaron Sorkin. So it will completely fail for reasons directly related to the way Mr. Sorkin relates to reality.